Embodiments of the inventive subject matter generally relate to the field of computer systems, and, more particularly, to computerized systems for synchronizing screenshots in documentation with product functionality.
The end user documentation of a product often contains screenshots that give users visual feedback on how to carry out a described process.
For documentation to be created with screenshots, the author of the documentation must typically understand the fundamental workings of the product, for example, how to install, set-up, etc. in order to generate the screenshots before inserting them into the documentation. This may be a problem if the author does not fully understand the workings of the product.
Another problem is that this documentation and the screenshots can easily get out of date. This could be due to functional changes in the way that the product works, or just a reorganization of the user interface. Either way it can provide confusion to the end user and may lead to a bad impression of the product.
Updating the screenshots in documentation is a slow and laborious process, which involves tracing the described path through the code and typically entering sample data. For complex scenarios, there may be a non-trivial amount of preparation that must be done in order to set up a suitable environment to demonstrate the capability being documented.
These problems are exacerbated by the requirement of producing documentation, and therefore screenshots, in multiple languages.
These problems have lead to some companies entirely abandoning screenshots in product documentation.